The team at Joomla is kicking off the New Year with the January issue of the Joomla magazine, and with news of the next major release of Joomla.

According to Dianne Henning, Joomla is shooting for the stars with the anticipated launch of the new version and a worldwide Joomla conference to look forward to in November 2012.

The big news for this issue is, of course, Joomla 2.5, and Hagen Graf has an introduction to the highlights you can look forward to when it’s released in January 2012.

This is the successor of Joomla 1.5 and will be the official version of Joomla until mid 2013, and Graf says the highlights of the new release start with ‘the shiny new Joomla Platform’, on which the CMS is based.

This opens many options for third party developers, such as image manipulation with a JImage class and generation of HTML tables with a grid class. There’s also a new smart search option called Finder that pre-searches your content to speed searches, and support has been added for more databases, so you’ll be able to run Joomla on MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Graf also says that drivers for PostgreSQL and Oracle seem to be very near.

If you’ve ever made a support call about Joomla to the team at CloudAccess.Net, you’ll know they live up to their promise of offering ‘Insane Support’. Ryan Bernstein has gone behind the scenes to find out about the team behind that insane support, and in particular the CEO, Gary Brooks. CloudAccess.net is the place people can download the free trial of Joomla! (at demo.joomla.org), and the article looks at how CloudAccess.net has become one of the fastest growing IT companies in Northern Michigan, which the article suggests would be a better location for an alternative ‘Bay’ as unlike the Bay area of San Francisco, there’s no earthquake fault to risk massive quakes. It’s an interesting idea, but would all those surfer dudes see the sense behind it?

Elsewhere in this issue, Matias Aguirre looks at how you can integrate WebSocket with Joomla, providing faster and dynamic communications between server and client. Aguirre has created a WebSocket library that you can then use to create your own WebSocket server. It’s a fascinating idea and one worth having a play with.

The story of MathML is not a happy one. It is a good idea - create a markup language for mathematical equations - but for some reason people just don't seem to want to get behind it. Will the ne [ ... ]